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Stanford's David Shaw keeping Cardinal on the climb

Stanford puts a premium on its offensive and defensive line play. Though the lines often directly impact the outcome of the game, they are not the flashiest places to play. (Notable exception: South Carolina's

Though the lines often directly impact the outcome of the game, they are not the flashiest places to play. (Notable exception: South Carolina's Jadeveon Clowney, 2013 Outback Bowl.)

But Stanford coach David Shaw wants both lines to get their due. So when the Cardinal recently remodeled their football facilities, he decided to make a statement.

When the Cardinal look to the left as they walk in through the players entrance, a huge picture of the offensive line greets them. When they look to the right, there's a huge picture of the defensive line.

"That's the beginning of football," Shaw says. "Our players, every time they walk in, they'll feel both lines. That's where football is won. That's where the game is established. That's where dominance is established."

Speaking of dominance, Stanford is 25-4 during Shaw's tenure, which featured the nation's best scoring defense in 2012. Dating to the final two years of the Jim Harbaugh coaching era, the Cardinal have compiled a 44-10 (.815) record since 2009. During this stretch, Stanford has won two Bowl Championship Series bowls: the Orange Bowl during the 2010 season (with Harbaugh at the helm) and the Rose Bowl during the 2012 season (with Shaw).

Stanford is known for its academic reputation, so its rise as a college football power in recent years has been rather unexpected. But in his four-year tenure, Harbaugh turned a team that went 1-11 in 2006 into one of the nation's top squads featuring a Heisman Trophy runner-up in quarterback Andrew Luck.

Then Harbaugh left for the NFL.

At the time, many outsiders figured Stanford would fade back into what it had been for the previous couple of decades: a middling team that occasionally earned bowl bids. But as it turned out, Stanford's success can be sustained — and not pinned to one person.

Rising through the ranks

In January 2011, Shaw was given the reins of the program, the first head coaching job of his career.

He'd been groomed for this moment all his life. Shaw's father is Willie Shaw, a man who coached college football and in the NFL for 30 years. The younger Shaw grew up spending a few years here, a few years there, bouncing around wherever his father's job took the family. He played college football at Stanford, where Willie twice had been an assistant.

"It's like the military," Shaw says. "If you have military parents, when you grow up you either want to be in the military or you want to be far away from the military. I think it's the same with coaching. The coaching life can be traumatizing. It's hard. You're moving every three to four years, you're switching schools. … It didn't bother me. I enjoyed it. To have my dad as a resource to talk about schemes, philosophy and sometimes just to talk about life as a coach and work-life balance — I think it's invaluable."

Like his father and most football coaches, Shaw took a winding path through the football world, starting as a linebackers coach at Western Washington University in 1995, making stops with three NFL teams and eventually returning to the college game, at the University of San Diego as Harbaugh's wide receivers and quarterbacks coach in 2006.

After an 11-1 campaign with the Toreros, the pair left for Stanford, where Harbaugh made Shaw his offensive coordinator. Shaw also coached wide receivers his first three years at Stanford, then running backs for a year.

"David's such a super high-quality guy who's been around the game his whole life, much like Jim," says Ky Snyder, the athletics director at the University of San Diego. "You could tell he was destined to be a head coach. He had that quality. … It was a matter of time to get a little more hands-on experience before he was ready to be a great head coach. But you could just see that was coming with David."

BCS bowl game appearances in each of Shaw's first two years back that up, though they don't quite separate him from his predecessor just yet. Two games into Year 3, Shaw still hears the Harbaugh comparisons, though he says he has no problem with it.

"I owe Jim a lot, for bringing me back to Stanford as his coordinator and leaving us with a great program," Shaw says. "It's on us who are there now to take this thing to the next level. I think we've done that the last couple of years."

Adaptability and continuity

The next level means sustaining success. That means recruiting, coaching, player development, sending more guys to the NFL — all the obvious things. But to truly get this Cardinal football program where he wants it to be, Shaw says, he has to copy Stanford's women's basketball program.

"The judgment of a true program is the flexibility," Shaw says. "I always talk about (Stanford women's basketball coach) Tara VanDerveer. She's been phenomenal at Stanford, no matter what kind of team she has. ...

"She's been able to change her game every year, and that's what we need to do. We've gone from a tight-end-centric offense to a more receiver and tight end offense. Before that, it was a quarterback-centric offense with Andrew Luck, and a running game. We have to be able, every year, to play at a high level, sometimes with different players and sometimes with different strengths."

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This season, Shaw hopes his offense will have more diversity, more ways to attack opponents. After beating Army 34-20 last week, he said he wanted the Cardinal to be a team that could easily put out five receivers on one play then two receivers and two running backs on the next, for example. "We want to be able to change personnel groupings and have the diversity to be good at everything that we do," he says.

Junior quarterback Kevin Hogan, who has started seven games in his career, is currently playing at a "B, B-plus level," Shaw says. That will need to get up to the A range if Stanford hopes to be in the running for the national championship. Ranked No.5 in the USA TODAY Sports Coaches Poll and the Associated Press poll, the Cardinal are on track to remain in that discussion. Stanford, which opens Pac-12 play Saturday against Arizona State, will face No.2 Oregon on Nov.7 in a matchup that could have title-game implications.

Shaw knows his teams have been a win away from the title game the last two years. He knows people still don't always equate Stanford with football prowess, but that respect for the program is growing.

Everything starts with Shaw — and those two lines in the photos at Stanford's football facility. Get used to hearing about the Cardinal offensive and defensive linemen now, because you surely will hear about them at the next level.

"What a lot of people don't understand is we've recruited speed, we've recruited size," Shaw says. "NFL GMs want guys with speed and size, but they want guys who don't make mistakes. Guys that are smart, that do their jobs. Guys that they can trust. Guys that have high character. That's all we have here. In the next few years with the guys we have, you're going to see six to eight guys a year making NFL teams. It's going to be every year."

Arkansas (3-0) at Rutgers (2-1), 3:30 p.m. ET, ESPN: Arkansas can match its win total from 2012 in the final game before the SEC slate gets underway. Alex Collins and Jonathan Williams are each averaging more than 130 yards rushing for the Razorbacks.
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North Carolina (1-1, 0-0) at Georgia Tech (2-1, 1-0), noon ET, ESPN: Already possessing a conference win, Georgia Tech can jump out to an even bigger lead in the Coastal Division, putting pressure on other contenders.
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Kansas State (2-1) at Texas (1-2), 8 p.m. ET, ABC: Mack Brown's seat continues to get hotter, but he's been preaching a potential run in the Big 12. A loss in the conference opener wouldn't be a good start.
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West Virginia (2-1) at Maryland (3-0) (in Baltimore), 3:30 p.m. ET, ESPNU: The Terps are 3-0, but haven't beaten anybody worthwhile. A win against rival West Virginia might turn some heads throughout the country. The Mountaineers have won seven in a row in the series.
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Utah (2-1) at BYU (1-1), 10:15 p.m. ET, ESPN2: Utah has won three in a row in the "Holy War" series, but is coming off a tough OT loss to Oregon State. After beating Texas, BYU had two week to prepare for their bitter rivals.
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Tennessee (2-1) at No. 18 Florida (1-1), 3:30 p.m. ET, CBS: The Gators had a bye week following their rough loss to Miami and they kick off their SEC schedule looking to regain some momentum against a Tennessee team that was mauled by Oregon last week.
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Auburn (3-0, 1-0) at No. 7 LSU (3-0, 0-0), 7:45 p.m. ET, ESPN: Auburn has started fast with three solid wins and head to Baton Rouge to take on an LSU team that many have overlooked in the SEC. LSU quarterback Zach Mettenberger has lit it up, throwing nine touchdowns with no interceptions.
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No. 23 Arizona State (2-0) at No. 5 Stanford (2-0), 7 p.m. ET, FOX: The Sun Devils' bizarre win over Wisconsin vaulted them into the top 25, but are immediately greeted by the Cardinal. Stanford looked sleepy at times last week against Army, and face their first real test here.
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No. 24 Michigan State (3-0) at No. 21 Notre Dame (2-1), 3:30 p.m. ET, NBC: Finally with a settled quarterback situation, the Spartans look to exact revenge on Notre Dame, which has won the last two in the series. A loss would be big trouble for Notre Dame with tough games against Oklahoma and Arizona State coming up.
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